July 24, 2014

Promotional Event: Life's Riverbed

Square Table.
2 persons, 4 places.
One for the handbags; one empty place.
The plate was in front of Sophie.

Marianne was sitting in front of her, speaking so much that Sophie could not hear it anymore:

“Why you don’t move to Tokyo? There you could learn Japanese and work as a teacher. Or you could move to France, learn French and work as a teacher too. Or stay where you are, but work as a teacher in a school. Any school. But what you do, this what you do now, will bring you nowhere. It is not even a street with an ending. It is not a path anymore. The world doesn’t need creators, we already have everything we need in this world.”

Sophia was looking at her plate…

Looking at the food on her plate.

It was like the kind of thing where you need more calories to chew and swallow, than the calories that the food itself contains.
Like Marianne’s words.

No wonder that Sophie was tired. It was exhausting.
Sophie had her own small atelier, where she made custom dresses. She thought about each one of her little growing pallet of clients.

After many years, Marianne decided to visit her, and Sophie was anxious about showing her the new collection.

Sophie’s small pallet of clients was happy.

And this made her happy, too. Growing step by step with her own business, she was happy.

She already had a friend to speak with about it, Lidia.

Lidia was an art student who liked to spend her free time in Sophie’s atelier, speaking about fashion and ideas. They helped each other in the past and Lidia used to say that they were like ‘sisters in art’.

Lidia rented a room to use as her own painting atelier, in the same building, and they liked to speak about art and fashion, a lot. And, to see each other’s work.

Sophie did not know why she accepted this lunch invitation from Marianne, after spending all morning hearing the same advice from her, about her atelier.

For lunch: Fancy Place, Fancy People, so Sophie chose her most beautiful dress. Made by her own hands. Persons turned to look at her, when she passed by, but Marianne did not notice that.
Sophie had brushed her hair 100 times, to have it bright and beautiful.

While she was trying to eat, her sister Marianne continued vomiting her world-view all over her.
Which made chewing her food even more difficult.

Life seemed to be just a letter, or a few words, in the metaphor of the Earth’s biography.
The Earth has a biography, what we see is a just a metaphor of it, and human life seemed to be just a small, minimal, part of this metaphor.

Sophie, hearing Marianne’s words, felt as would she be just a letter in the alphabet of a foreign language that no one seems to speak anymore. With her life, just a few words in the metaphor of the Earth’s biography. Just a small part of it.

She wanted to speak about her ideas, and to have the approval and admiration of her sister. The love of her sister. Maybe her sister would like to wear one of her new creations?

The same sister that used to brush her hair and dress her like a princess.

The same sister that showed her how to make a dress for a doll. The same sister who explained to her that dresses were not made always in series by machines, but that they were creations.

But, with the first dress she wanted to show Marianne this morning, the answer was: “I know your dresses already.”
As would they all be the same, since she made the first dress for a doll when she was 6 years old, under her sister’s advice.
And now, the same advice again…at lunchtime.
It was exhausting. Marianne had changed. Life changed her.
Marianne had become dreamless.